Ep 26. Love, Freedom, Feminism, and Keeping Dalit Life Intact: Featuring Nikhil Pandhi

The new anthology "Love in the Time of Cast" gathers seventeen Dalit love stories that range from brutal violence to tender intimacy, illustrating how everyday narratives can serve as primary sources for caste analysis. Curated by anthropologist Nikhil Pandhi, the collection emerged from years of fieldwork with Dalit doctors, ASHA workers, and low‑income opioid users in northern India. By translating Hindi texts and weaving them into a literary framework, the project bridges medical anthropology, public health, and literary studies, offering a fresh interdisciplinary lens on caste‑inflected lives.

Central to the volume is an anti‑caste feminist agenda that repositions love as a reparative tool rather than a conventional romance trope. The stories foreground diverse relationships—siblings, parents, neighbors, and urban partners—while deliberately subverting Brahmanical and heteropatriarchal scripts. This approach highlights how affection can generate new affiliations, challenge normative taxonomies, and expose the necropolitics of caste. By situating love alongside desire, compassion, and resistance, the anthology expands Dalit feminism beyond rural stereotypes, showcasing metropolitan subjects navigating multiple worlds.

For scholars, activists, and readers interested in decolonization, the anthology demonstrates the power of narrative to translate complex caste dynamics into accessible, affective forms. Its emphasis on translation, archival work, and community‑driven storytelling underscores the importance of preserving Dalit voices within global feminist discourses. The collection not only enriches Dalit literature but also provides a template for interdisciplinary collaborations that fuse anthropology, health studies, and literary criticism, inviting a broader audience to engage with liberatory futures rooted in lived experience.